'A Nation of Poets and Thinkers' - Less So with Eastern Enlargement? Austria and Germany

Many people in the European Union fear that Eastern Enlargement will lead to major job losses. More recently, these fears about job losses have extended to high skill labor and IT jobs. The paper examines with new firm level data whether these fears are justified for the two neighboring countries of Eastern Enlargement Austria and Germany. We find that Eastern Enlargement leads to surprising small job losses, because jobs in Eastern Europe do not compete with jobs in Austria and Germany. Low cost jobs of affiliates in Eastern Europe help Austrian and German firms to stay competitive in an increasingly competitive environment. However, we also find that multinational firms in Austria and Germany are outsourcing the most skill intensive activities to Eastern Europe taking advantage of cheap abundant skilled labor in Eastern Europe. We find that the firms' outsourcing activities to Eastern Europe are a response to a human capital scarcity in Austria and Germany which has become particularly severe in the 1990s. Corporations' outsourcing of skill intensive firm activity to Eastern Europe has helped to ease the human capital crisis in both countries. We find that high skilled jobs transferred to Eastern Europe account for 10 percent of Germany's and 48 percent of Austria's supply of university graduates in the 1990s. We then discuss what can be done to address the skill exodus to Eastern Europe. We show that R&D subsidies do not work in economies with a skill crisis and we suggest to liberalize the movement of high skill labor with Eastern Enlargement

外汇风险溢酬理论述评

外汇风险溢酬是从资产定价角度研究汇率变化的核心内容,但还未获得一致结论。目前,对外汇风险溢酬的时间序列建模并不理想,隐含变量模型和仿射模型都不能刻画外汇风险溢酬的时间序列特征;对外汇风险溢酬风险因子的研究缺乏一个统一框架,消费、微观市场因子和货币政策都只能部分解释外汇风险溢酬的变化。基于随机贴现因子的模型目前相对零散,但这一框架是后续研究的重点。一个亟待研究的课题是既把汇率作为投资性资产的价格,又考虑汇率作为两国货币的相对比价,研究外汇风险溢酬与两国经济波动、两国经济相关性的内在联系,从理论上厘清影响外汇风险溢酬的因素